The American Spirit in Literature by Bliss Perry

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Title: The American Spirit in Literature, A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The Chronicles Of America Series
Author: Bliss Perry
Editor: Allen Johnson
Release Date: January 15, 2009 [EBook #3410]
Last Updated: February 7, 2013
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8

Produced by The James J. Kelly Library of St. Gregory's University, Alev Akman, David Widger, and Robert Homa.

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE ***

The American Spirit in

Literature

By Bliss Perry

A Chronicle of Great Interpreters

Volume 34 of the

Chronicles of America Series

∴

Allen Johnson, Editor

Assistant Editors
Gerhard R. Lomer
Charles W. Jefferys

Abraham Lincoln Edition

New Haven: Yale University Press
Toronto: Glasgow, Brook & Co.

London: Humphrey Milford

Oxford University Press

1918

Copyright, 1918

by Yale University Press

CONTENTS

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THE AMERICAN SPIRIT IN LITERATURE

∴
∴

CHAPTER I.

THE PIONEERS

The United States of America has been from the beginning in a perpetual change. The physical and mental restlessness of the
American and the temporary nature of many of his arrangements are largely due to the experimental character of the exploration
and development of this continent. The new energies released by the settlement of the colonies were indeed guided by stern
determination, wise forethought, and inventive skill; but no one has ever really known the outcome of the experiment. It is a story
of faith, of

Effort, and expectation, and desire,
And something evermore about to be.

An Alexander Hamilton may urge with passionate force the adoption of the Constitution, without any firm conviction as to its

permanence. The most clear-sighted American of the Civil War period recognized this element of uncertainty in our American
adventure when he declared: "We are now testing whether this nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long
endure." More than fifty years have passed since that war reaffirmed the binding force of the Constitution and apparently sealed
the perpetuity of the Union. Yet the gigantic economic and social changes now in progress are serving to show that the United
States has its full share of the anxieties which beset all human institutions in this daily altering world.

"We are but strangers in an inn, but passengers in a ship," said Roger Williams. This sense of the transiency of human effort,

the perishable nature of human institutions, was quick in the consciousness of the gentleman adventurers and sober Puritan
citizens who emigrated from England to the New World. It had been a familiar note in the poetry of that Elizabethan period
which had followed with such breathless interest the exploration of America. It was a conception which could be shared alike by
a saint like John Cotton or a soldier of fortune like John Smith. Men are tent-dwellers. Today they settle here, and tomorrow
they have struck camp and are gone. We are strangers and sojourners, as all our fathers were.

This instinct of the camper has stamped itself upon American life and thought. Venturesomeness, physical and moral daring,

resourcefulness in emergencies, indifference to negligible details, wastefulness of materials, boundless hope and confidence in the
morrow, are characteristics of the American. It is scarcely an exaggeration to say that the "good American" has been he who has
most resembled a good camper. He has had robust health—unless or until he has abused it,—a tolerant disposition, and an
ability to apply his fingers or his brain to many unrelated and unexpected tasks. He is disposed to blaze his own trail. He has a
touch of prodigality, and, withal, a knack of keeping his tent or his affairs in better order than they seem. Above all, he has been
ever ready to break camp when he feels the impulse to wander. He likes to be "foot-loose." If he does not build his roads as
solidly as the Roman roads were built, nor his houses like the English houses, it is because he feels that he is here today and gone
tomorrow. If he has squandered the physical resources of his neighborhood, cutting the forests recklessly, exhausting the soil,
surrendering water power and minerals into a few far-clutching fingers, he has done it because he expects, like Voltaire's Signor
Pococurante, "to have a new garden tomorrow, built on a nobler plan." When New York State grew too crowded for Cooper's
Leather-Stocking, he shouldered his pack, whistled to his dog, glanced at the sun, and struck a bee-line for the Mississippi.
Nothing could be more typical of the first three hundred years of American history.

The traits of the pioneer have thus been the characteristic traits of the American in action. The memories of successive

generations have tended to stress these qualities to the neglect of others. Everyone who has enjoyed the free life of the woods
will confess that his own judgment upon his casual summer associates turns, quite naturally and almost exclusively, upon their
characteristics as woodsmen. Out of the woods, these gentlemen may be more or less admirable divines, pedants, men of affairs;
but the verdict of their companions in the forest is based chiefly upon the single question of their adaptability to the environment
of the camp. Are they quick of eye and foot, skillful with rod and gun, cheerful on rainy days, ready to do a little more than their
share of drudgery? If so, memory holds them.

Some such unconscious selection as this has been at work in the classification of our representative men. The building of the

nation and the literary expression of its purpose and ideals are tasks which have called forth the strength of a great variety of
individuals. Some of these men have proved to be peculiarly fitted for a specific service, irrespective of the question of their
general intellectual powers, or their rank as judged by the standard of European performance in the same field. Thus the battle of
New Orleans, in European eyes a mere bit of frontier fighting, made Andrew Jackson a "hero" as indubitably as if he had
defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. It gave him the Presidency.

The analogy holds in literature. Certain expressions of American sentiment or conviction have served to summarize or to

clarify the spirit of the nation. The authors of these productions have frequently won the recognition and affection of their
contemporaries by means of prose and verse quite unsuited to sustain the test of severe critical standards. Neither Longfellow's
Excelsior nor Poe's Bells nor Whittier's Maud Muller is among the best poems of the three writers in question, yet there was
something in each of these productions which caught the fancy of a whole American generation. It expressed one phase of the

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national mind in a given historical period.

The historian of literature is bound to take account of this question of literary vogue, as it is highly significant of the temper of

successive generations in any country. But it is of peculiar interest to the student of the literature produced in the United States. Is
this literature "American," or is it "English literature in America," as Professor Wendell and other scholars have preferred to call
it? I should be one of the last to minimize the enormous influence of England upon the mind and the writing of all the English-
speaking countries of the globe. Yet it will be one of the purposes of the present book to indicate the existence here, even in
colonial times, of a point of view differing from that of the mother country, and destined to differ increasingly with the lapse of
time. Since the formation of our Federal Union, in particular, the books produced in the United States have tended to exhibit
certain characteristics which differentiate them from the books produced in other English-speaking countries. We must beware,
of course, of what the late Charles Francis Adams once called the "filiopietistic" fallacy. The "American" qualities of our literature
must be judged in connection with its conformity to universal standards of excellence. Tested by any universal standard, The
Scarlet Letter is a notable romance. It has won a secure place among the literature written by men of English blood and speech.
Yet to overlook the peculiarly local or provincial characteristics of this remarkable story is to miss the secret of its inspiration. It
could have been written only by a New Englander, in the atmosphere of a certain epoch.

Our task, then, in this rapid review of the chief interpreters of the American spirit in literature, is a twofold one. We are

primarily concerned with a procession of men, each of whom is interesting as an individual and as a writer. But we cannot watch
the individuals long without perceiving the general direction of their march, the ideas that animate them, the common hopes and
loyalties that make up the life of their spirit. To become aware of these general tendencies is to understand the "American" note in
our national writing.

Our historians have taught us that the history of the United States is an evolution towards political unity. The separatist,

particularist movements are gradually thrust to one side. In literary history, likewise, we best remember those authors who fall
into line with what we now perceive to have been the course of our literary development. The erratic men and women, the
"sports" of the great experiment, are ultimately neglected by the critics, unless, like the leaders of political insurrections, those
writing men and women have raised a notable standard of revolt. No doubt the apparently unique literary specimens, if clearly
understood in their origins and surroundings, would be found rooted in the general laws of literary evolution. But these laws are
not easy to codify and we must avoid the temptation to discover, in any particular period, more of unity than there actually was.
And we must always remember that there will be beautiful prose and verse unrelated to the main national tendencies save as "the
literature of escape." We owe this lesson to the genius of Edgar Allan Poe.

Let us test these principles by applying them to the earliest colonists. The first book written on the soil of what is now the

United States was Captain John Smith's True Relation of the planting of the Virginia colony in 1607. It was published in London
in 1608. The Captain was a typical Elizabethan adventurer, with a gift, like so many of his class, for picturesque narrative. In
what sense, if at all, may his writings on American topics be classified as "American" literary productions? It is clear that his
experiences in the New World were only one phase of the variegated life of this English soldier of fortune. But the American
imagination has persistently claimed him as representing something peculiarly ours, namely, a kind of pioneer hardihood,
resourcefulness, leadership, which was essential to the exploration and conquest of the wilderness. Most of Smith's companions
were unfitted for the ordeal which he survived. They perished miserably in the "starving time." But he was of the stuff from which
triumphant immigrants have ever been made, and it is our recognition of the presence of these qualities in the Captain which
makes us think of his books dealing with America as if they were "American books." There are other narratives by colonists
temporarily residing in the Virginia plantations which gratify our historical curiosity, but which we no more consider a part of
American literature than the books written by Stevenson, Kipling, and Wells during their casual visits to this country. But Captain
Smith's True Relation impresses us, like Mark Twain's Roughing It, with being somehow true to type. In each of these books
the possible unveracities in detail are a confirmation of their representative American character.

In other words, we have unconsciously formulated, in the course of centuries, a general concept of "the pioneer." Novelists,

poets, and historians have elaborated this conception. Nothing is more inevitable than our reaching back to the beginning of the
seventeenth century and endeavoring to select, among the thousands of Englishmen who emigrated or even thought of emigrating
to this country, those who possessed the genuine heart and sinew of the permanent settler.

Oliver Cromwell, for instance, is said to have thought of emigrating hither in 1637. If he had joined his friends John Cotton and

Roger Williams in New England, who can doubt that the personal characteristics of "my brave Oliver" would today be identified
with the "American" qualities which we discover in 1637 on the shores of Massachusetts Bay? And what an American settler
Cromwell would have made!

If we turn from physical and moral daring to the field of theological and political speculation, it is easy today to select, among

the writings of the earliest colonists, certain radical utterances which seem to presage the very temper of the late eighteenth
century. Pastor John Robinson's farewell address to the Pilgrims at Leyden in 1620 contained the famous words: "The Lord has
more truth yet to break forth out of His holy Word. I cannot sufficiently bewail the condition of the reformed churches, who are
come to a period in religion.… Luther and Calvin were great and shining lights in their times, yet they penetrated not into the
whole counsel of God." Now John Robinson, like Oliver Cromwell, never set foot on American soil, but he is identified, none the
less, with the spirit of American liberalism in religion.

In political discussion, the early emergence of that type of independence familiar to the decade 1765-75 is equally striking. In

a letter written in 1818, John Adams insisted that "the principles and feelings which produced the Revolution ought to be traced
back for two hundred years, and sought in the history of the country from the first plantations in America." "I have always
laughed," he declared in an earlier letter, "at the affectation of representing American independence as a novel idea, as a modern
discovery, as a late invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a probable event, nay as a necessary and unavoidable
measure, in case Great Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority over us, has been familiar to Americans from the first

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settlement of the country."

There is, then, a predisposition, a latent or potential Americanism which existed long before the United States came into being.

Now that our political unity has become a fact, the predisposition is certain to be regarded by our own and by future generations
as evidence of a state of mind which made our separate national life inevitable. Yet to Thomas Hutchinson, a sound historian and
honest man, the last Royal Governor of Massachusetts, a separate national life seemed in 1770 an unspeakable error and
calamity.

The seventeenth-century colonists were predominantly English, in blood, in traditions, and in impulses. Whether we look at

Virginia or Plymouth or at the other colonies that were planted in swift succession along the seaboard, it is clear that we are
dealing primarily with men of the English race. Most of them would have declared, with as much emphasis as Francis Hopkinson
a century later, "We of America are in all respects Englishmen." Professor Edward Channing thinks that it took a century of
exposure to colonial conditions to force the English in America away from the traditions and ideals of those who continued to live
in the old land. But the student of literature must keep constantly in mind that these English colonizers represented no single type
of the national character. There were many men of many minds even within the contracted cabin of the Mayflower. The "sifted
wheat" was by no means all of the same variety.

For Old England was never more torn by divergent thought and subversive act than in the period between the death of

Elizabeth in 1603 and the Revolution of 1688. In this distracted time who could say what was really "English"? Was it James the
First or Raleigh? Archbishop Laud or John Cotton? Charles the First or Cromwell? Charles the Second or William Penn? Was it
Churchman, Presbyterian, Independent, Separatist, Quaker? One is tempted to say that the title of Ben Jonson's comedy Every
Man in his Humour became the standard of action for two whole generations of Englishmen, and that there is no common
denominator for emigrants of such varied pattern as Smith and Sandys of Virginia, Morton of Merrymount, John Winthrop, "Sir"
Christopher Gardiner and Anne Hutchinson of Boston, and Roger Williams of Providence. They seem as miscellaneous as
"Kitchener's Army."

It is true that we can make certain distinctions. Virginia, as has often been said, was more like a continuation of English

society, while New England represented a digression from English society. There were then, as now, "stand-patters" and
"progressives." It was the second class who, while retaining very conservative notions about property, developed a fearless
intellectual radicalism which has written itself into the history of the United States. But to the student of early American literature
all such generalizations are of limited value. He is dealing with individual men, not with "Cavalier" or "Roundhead" as such. He
has learned from recent historians to distrust any such facile classification of the first colonists. He knows by this time that there
were aristocrats in Massachusetts and commoners in Virginia; that the Pilgrims of Plymouth were more tolerant than the Puritans
of Boston, and that Rhode Island was more tolerant than either. Yet useful as these general statements may be, the interpreter of
men of letters must always go back of the racial type or the social system to the individual person. He recognizes, as a truth for
him, that theory of creative evolution which holds that in the ascending progress of the race each thinking person becomes a
species by himself.

While something is gained, then, by remembering that the racial instincts and traditions of the first colonists were

overwhelmingly English, and that their political and ethical views were the product of a turbulent and distraught time, it is even
more important to note how the physical situation of the colonists affected their intellectual and moral, as well as their political
problems. Among the emigrants from England, as we have seen, there were great varieties of social status, religious opinion,
individual motive. But at least they all possessed the physical courage and moral hardihood to risk the dangerous voyage, the
fearful hardships, and the vast uncertainties of the new life. To go out at all, under the pressure of any motive, was to meet
triumphantly a searching test. It was in truth a "sifting," and though a few picturesque rascals had the courage to go into exile
while a few saints may have been deterred, it is a truism to say that the pioneers were made up of brave men and braver women.

It cannot be asserted that their courage was the result of any single, dominating motive, equally operative in all of the colonies.

Mrs. Hemans's familiar line about seeking "freedom to worship God" was measurably true of the Pilgrims of Plymouth, about
whom she was writing. But the far more important Puritan emigration to Massachusetts under Winthrop aimed not so much at
"freedom" as at the establishment of a theocracy according to the Scriptures. These men straightway denied freedom of worship,
not only to newcomers who sought to join them, but to those members of their own company who developed independent ways
of thinking. The list of motives for emigration ran the whole gamut, from missionary fervor for converting the savages, down
through a commendable desire for gain, to the perhaps no less praiseworthy wish to escape a debtor's prison or the pillory. A
few of the colonists were rich. Some were beggars or indentured servants. Most of them belonged to the middle class. John
Harvard was the son of a butcher; Thomas Shepard, the son of a grocer; Roger Williams, the son of a tailor. But all three were
university bred and were natural leaders of men.

Once arrived in the wilderness, the pioneer life common to all of the colonists began instantly to exert its slow, irresistible

pressure upon their minds and to mould them into certain ways of thinking and feeling. Without some perception of these modes
of thought and emotion a knowledge of the spirit of our literature is impossible. Take, for instance, the mere physical situation of
the first colonists, encamped on the very beach of the wide ocean with an illimitable forest in their rear. Their provisions were
scanty. They grew watchful of the strange soil, of the new skies, of the unknown climate. Even upon the voyage over, John
Winthrop thought that "the declination of the pole star was much, even to the view, beneath that it is in England," and that "the
new moon, when it first appeared, was much smaller than at any time he had seen it in England." Here was a man evidently using
his eyes with a new interest in natural phenomena. Under these changed skies the mind began gradually to change also.

At first the colonists felt themselves an outpost of Europe, a forlorn hope of the Protestant Reformation. "We shall be as a city

upon a hill," said Winthrop. "The eyes of all people are upon us." Their creed was Calvinism, then in its third generation of
dominion and a European doctrine which was not merely theological but social and political. The emigrant Englishmen were soon
to discover that it contained a doctrine of human rights based upon human needs. At the beginning of their novel experience they

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were doubtless unaware of any alteration in their theories. But they were facing a new situation, and that new situation became an
immense factor in their unconscious growth. Their intellectual and moral problems shifted, as a boat shifts her ballast when the
wind blows from a new quarter. The John Cotton preaching in a shed in the new Boston had come to "suffer a sea-change" from
the John Cotton who had been rector of St. Botolph's splendid church in Lincolnshire. The "church without a bishop" and the
"state without a king" became a different church and state from the old, however loyally the ancient forms and phrases were
retained.

If the political problems of equality which were latent in Calvinism now began to take on a different meaning under the

democratic conditions of pioneer life, the inner, spiritual problems of that amazing creed were intensified. "Fallen" human nature
remained the same, whether in the crowded cosmopolitan streets of Holland and London, or upon the desolate shores of Cape
Cod. But the moral strain of the old insoluble conflict between "fixed fate" and "free will" was heightened by the physical
loneliness of the colonists. Each soul must fight its own unaided, unending battle. In that moral solitude, as in the physical solitude
of the settlers upon the far northwestern prairies of a later epoch, many a mind snapped. Unnatural tension was succeeded by
unnatural crimes. But for the stronger intellects New England Calvinism became a potent spiritual gymnastic, where, as in the
Swedish system of bodily training, one lifts imaginary and ever-increasing weights with imaginary and ever-increasing effort,
flexor and extensor muscles pulling against one another, driven by the will. Calvinism bred athletes as well as maniacs.

The new situation, again, turned many of the theoretical speculations of the colonists into practical issues. Here, for example,

was the Indian. Was he truly a child of God, possessing a soul, and, if so, had he partaken of the sin of Adam? These questions
perplexed the saintly Eliot and the generous Roger Williams. But before many years the query as to whether a Pequot warrior
had a soul became suddenly less important than the practical question as to whether the Pequot should be allowed any further
chances of taking the white man's scalp. On this last issue the colonists were unanimous in the negative.

It would be easy to multiply such instances of a gradual change of view. But beneath all the changes and all the varieties of

individual behavior in the various colonies that began to dot the seaboard, certain qualities demanded by the new surroundings
are felt in colonial life and in colonial writings. One of these is the instinct for order, or at least that degree of order essential to the
existence of a camp. It was not in vain that John Smith sought to correct the early laxness at Jamestown by the stern edict: "He
that will not work, neither shall he eat." Dutch and Quaker colonies taught the same inexorable maxim of thrift. Soon there was
work enough for all, at good wages, but the lesson had been taught. It gave Franklin's Poor Richard mottoes their flavor of
homely, experienced truth.

Order in daily life led straight to political order, just as the equality and resourcefulness of the frontier, stimulated by isolation

from Europe, led to political independence. The pioneer learned to make things for himself instead of sending to London for
them, and by and by he grew as impatient of waiting for a political edict from London as he would become in waiting for a
London plough. "This year," wrote one colonist, "ye will go to complain to the Parliament, and the next year they will send to see
how it is, and the third year the government is changed." The time was coming when no more complaints would be sent.

One of the most startling instances of this colonial instinct for self-government is the case of Thomas Hooker. Trained in

Emmanuel College of the old Cambridge, he arrived in the new Cambridge in 1633. He grew restless under its theocratic
government, being, it was said, "a person who when he was doing his Master's work would put a king into his pocket." So he
led the famous migration of 1636 from Massachusetts to Hartford, and there helped to create a federation of independent towns
which made their own constitution without mentioning any king, and became one of the corner-stones of American democracy.
In May, 1638, Hooker declared in a sermon before the General Court "that the choice of public magistrates belongs unto the
people by God's own allowance," and "that they who have the power to appoint officers and magistrates, it is in their power,
also, to set the bounds and limitations of the power and place into which they call them." The reason of this is: "Because the
foundation of authority is laid, firstly, in the free consent of the people." This high discourse antedates the famous pamphlets
on liberty by Milton. It is a half-century earlier than Locke's Treatise on Government, a century and a quarter earlier than
Rousseau's Contrat Social, and it precedes by one hundred and thirty-eight years the American Declaration of Independence.

But the slightest acquaintance with colonial writings will reveal the fact that such political radicalism as Thomas Hooker's was

accompanied by an equally striking conservatism in other directions. One of these conservative traits was the pioneer's respect
for property, and particularly for the land cleared by his own toil. Gladstone once spoke of possession of the soil as the most
important and most operative of all social facts. Free-footed as the pioneer colonist was, he was disinclined to part with his land
without a substantial price for it. The land at his disposal was practically illimitable, but he showed a very English tenacity in
safeguarding his hold upon his own portion.

Very English, likewise, was his attachment to the old country as "home." The lighter and the more serious writings of the

colonists are alike in their respect for the past. In the New England settlements, although not at first in Virginia, there was respect
for learning and for an educated clergy. The colonists revered the Bible. They maintained a stubborn regard for the Common
Law of England. Even amid all the excitement of a successful rebellion from the mother country, this Common Law still held the
Americans to the experience of the inescapable past.

Indeed, as the reader of today lifts his eyes from the pages of the books written in America during the seventeenth century,

and tries to meditate upon the general difference between them and the English books written during the same period, he will be
aware of the firmness with which the conservative forces held on this side of the Atlantic. It was only one hundred years from the
Great Armada of 1588 to the flight of James Second, the last of the Stuart Kings. With that Revolution of 1688 the struggles
characteristic of the seventeenth century in England came to an end. A new working basis is found for thought, politics, society,
literature. But while those vast changes had been shaking England, two generations of American colonists had cleared their
forests, fought the savages, organized their townships and their trade, put money in their purses, and lived, though as yet hardly
suspecting it, a life that was beginning to differentiate them from the men of the Old World. We must now glance at the various
aspects of this isolated life of theirs, as it is revealed in their books.

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CHAPTER II.

THE FIRST COLONIAL LITERATURE

The simplest and oldest group of colonial writings is made up of records of exploration and adventure. They are like the letters
written from California in 1849 to the "folks back East." Addressed to home-keeping Englishmen across the sea, they describe
the new world, explain the present situation of the colonists, and express their hopes for the future. Captain John Smith's True
Relation, already alluded to, is the typical production of this class: a swift marching book, full of eager energy, of bluff and
breezy picturesqueness, and of triumphant instinct for the main chance. Like most of the Elizabethans, he cannot help poetizing in
his prose. Cod-fishing is to him a "sport"; "and what sport doth yeald a more pleasing content, and lesse hurt or charge then
angling with a hooke, and crossing the sweete ayre from Isle to Isle, over the silent streams of a calme Sea?" But the gallant
Captain is also capable of very plain speech, Cromwellian in its simplicity, as when he writes back to the London stockholders of
the Virginia Company: "When you send again, I entreat you rather send but thirty carpenters, husbandmen, gardeners, fishermen,
blacksmiths, masons, and diggers up of trees' roots, well provided, than a thousand of such as we have."

America was but an episode in the wide wanderings of Captain Smith, but he owes his place in human memory today to the

physical and mental energy with which he met the demands of a new situation, and to the vividness with which he dashed down
in words whatever his eyes had seen. Whether, in that agreeable passage about Pocahontas, he was guilty of romancing a little,
no one really knows, but the Captain, as the first teller of this peculiarly American type of story, will continue to have an indulgent
audience.

But other exiles in Virginia were skillful with the pen. William Strachey's True Reportory of the Wrack of Sir Thomas

Gates, Kt., vpon and from the islands of the Bermudas may or may not have given a hint to Shakespeare for the storm-scene
in The Tempest. In either case it is admirable writing, flexible, sensitive, shrewdly observant. Whitaker, the apostle of Virginia,
mingles, like many a missionary of the present day, the style of an exhorter with a keen discernment of the traits of the savage
mind. George Percy, fresh from Northumberland, tells in a language as simple as Defoe's the piteous tale of five months of illness
and starvation, watched by "those wild and cruel Pagans." John Pory, of "the strong potations," who thinks that "good company
is the soul of this life," nevertheless comforts himself in his solitude among the "crystal rivers and odoriferous woods" by reflecting
that he is escaping envy and expense. George Sandys, scholar and poet, finds his solace during a Virginia exile in continuing his
translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Colonel Norwood, an adventurer who belongs to a somewhat later day, since he speaks
of having "read Mr. Smith's travels," draws the long bow of narrative quite as powerfully as the redoubtable Smith, and far more
smoothly, as witness his accounts of starvation on shipboard and cannibalism on shore. This Colonel is an artist who would have
delighted Stevenson.

All of these early tellers of Virginia tales were Englishmen, and most of them returned to England, where their books were

printed and their remaining lives were passed. But far to the northeast of Virginia there were two colonies of men who earned the
right to say, in William Bradford's quiet words, "It is not with us as with other men, whom small things can discourage, or small
discontentments cause to wish themselves at home again." One was the colony of Pilgrims at Plymouth, headed by Bradford
himself. The other was the Puritan colony of Massachusetts Bay, with John Winthrop as governor.

Bradford and Winthrop have left journals which are more than chronicles of adventure. They record the growth and

government of a commonwealth. Both Bradford and Winthrop were natural leaders of men, grave, dignified, solid, endowed
with a spirit that bred confidence. Each was learned. Winthrop, a lawyer and man of property, had a higher social standing than
Bradford, who was one of the Separatists of Robinson's flock at Leyden. But the Pilgrim of the Mayflower and the well-to-do
Puritan of the Bay Colony both wrote their annals like gentlemen and scholars. Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation runs
from 1620 to 1647. Winthrop's diary, now printed as the History of New England, begins with his voyage in 1630 and closes
in the year of his death, 1649. As records of an Anglo-Saxon experiment in self-government under pioneer conditions these
books are priceless; as human documents, they illuminate the Puritan character; as for "literary" value in the narrow sense of that
word, neither Bradford nor Winthrop seems to have thought of literary effect. Yet the leader of the Pilgrims has passages of
grave sweetness and charm, and his sketch of his associate, Elder Brewster, will bear comparison with the best English
biographical writing of that century. Winthrop is perhaps more varied in tone, as he is in matter, but he writes throughout as a
ruler of men should write, with "decent plainness and manly freedom." His best known pages, justly praised by Tyler and other
historians of American thought, contain his speech before the General Court in 1645 on the nature of true liberty. No paragraphs
written in America previous to the Revolution would have given more pleasure to Abraham Lincoln, but it is to be feared that
Lincoln never saw Governor Winthrop's book, though his own ancestor, Samuel Lincoln of Hingham, lived under Winthrop's
jurisdiction.

The theory of government held by the dominant party of the first two generations of New England pioneers has often been

called a "theocracy," that is to say, a government according to the Word of God as expounded and enforced by the clergy. The
experiment was doomed to ultimate failure, for it ran counter to some of the noblest instincts of human nature. But its

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administration was in the hands of able men. The power of the clergy was well-nigh absolute. The political organization of the
township depended upon the ecclesiastical organization as long as the right to vote was confined to church members. How
sacrosanct and awful was the position of the clergyman may be perceived from Hawthorne's The Minister's Black Veil and The
Scarlet Letter.

Yet it must be said that men like Hooker and Cotton, Shepard and Norton, had every instinct and capacity for leadership.

With the notable exception of Hooker, such men were aristocrats, holding John Winthrop's opinion that "Democracy is, among
most civil nations, accounted the meanest and worst form of government." They were fiercely intolerant. The precise reason for
the Hooker migration from Cambridge to Hartford in 1636—the very year of the founding of Harvard—was prudently withheld,
but it is now thought to be the instinct of escape from the clerical architects of the Cambridge Platform. Yet no one would today
call Thomas Hooker a liberal in religion, pioneer in political liberty though he proved to be. His extant sermons have the steady
stroke of a great hammer; smiting at the mind and heart. "Others because they have felt the heavy hand of God … upon these
grounds they build their hopes: 'I have had my hell in this life, and I hope to have heaven in the world to come; I hope the worst
is over.'" Not so, thunders the preacher in reply: "Sodom and Gomorrah they burnt in brimstone and they shall burn in hell." One
of Hooker's successors has called him "a son of thunder and a son of consolation by turns." The same may be said of Thomas
Shepard, another graduate of Emmanuel College in the old Cambridge, who became the "soul-melting preacher" of the newer
Cambridge by the Charles. Pure, ravishing notes of spiritual devotion still sing themselves in his pages. He is wholly Calvinist. He
thinks "the truth is a poor mean thing in itself" and that the human reason cannot be "the last resolution of all doubts," which must
be sought only in the written Word of God. He holds it "a tough work, a wonderful hard matter to be saved." "Jesus Christ is not
got with a wet finger." Yet, like so many mystics, he yearns to be "covered with God, as with a cloud," to be "drowned, plunged,
and swallowed up with God." One hundred years later we shall find this same rhapsodic ecstasy in the meditations of Jonathan
Edwards.

John Cotton, the third of the mighty men in the early Colonial pulpit, owes his fame more to his social and political influence

than to his literary power. Yet even that was thought commanding. Trained, like Hooker and Shepard, at Emmanuel College,
and fresh from the rectorship of St. Botolph's in the Lincolnshire Boston, John Cotton dominated that new Boston which was
named in his honor. He became the Pope of the theocracy; a clever Pope and not an unkindly one. He seems to have shared
some of the opinions of Anne Hutchinson, though he "pronounced the sentence of admonition" against her, says Winthrop, with
much zeal and detestation of her errors. Hawthorne, in one of his ironic moods, might have done justice to this scene. Cotton
was at heart too liberal for his rôle of Primate, and fate led him to persecute a man whose very name has become a symbol of
victorious tolerance, Roger Williams.

Williams, known today as a friend of Cromwell, Milton, and Sir Harry Vane, had been exiled from Massachusetts for

maintaining that the civil power had no jurisdiction over conscience. This doctrine was fatal to the existence of a theocratic state
dominated by the church. John Cotton was perfectly logical in "enlarging" Roger Williams into the wilderness, but he showed less
than his usual discretion in attacking the quick-tempered Welshman in pamphlets. It was like asking Hotspur if he would kindly
consent to fight. Back and forth the books fly, for Williams loves this game. His Bloody Tenet of Persecution for Cause of
Conscience calls forth Mr. Cotton's Bloody Tenet washed and made white in the Blood of the Lamb; and this in turn
provokes the torrential flood of Williams's masterpiece, The Bloody Tenet yet more Bloody, by Mr. Cotton's endeavor to
wash it white in the Blood of the Lamb. There is glorious writing here, and its effect cannot be suggested by quoting sentences.
But there is one sentence in a letter written by Williams in his old age to his fellow-townsmen of Providence which points the
whole moral of the terrible mistake made by the men who sought spiritual liberty in America for themselves, only to deny that
same liberty to others. "I have only one motion and petition," begs this veteran pioneer who had forded many a swollen stream
and built many a rude bridge in the Plantations: "it is this, that after you have got over the black brook of some soul bondage
yourselves, you tear not down the bridge after you."

It is for such wise and humane counsels as this that Roger Williams is remembered. His opponents had mightier intellects than

his, but the world has long since decided against them. Colonial sermon literature is read today chiefly by antiquarians who have
no sympathy for the creed which once gave it vitality. Its theology, like the theology of Paradise Lost or the Divine Comedy,
has sunk to the bottom of the black brook. But we cannot judge fairly the contemporary effect of this pulpit literature without
remembering the passionate faith that made pulpit and pews copartners in a supreme spiritual struggle. Historians properly insist
upon the æsthetic poverty of the New England Puritans; that their rule of life cut them off from an enjoyment of the dramatic
literature of their race, then just closing its most splendid epoch; that they had little poetry or music and no architecture and
plastic art. But we must never forget that to men of their creed the Sunday sermons and the week-day "lectures" served as
oratory, poetry, and drama. These outpourings of the mind and heart of their spiritual leaders were the very stuff of human
passion in its intensest forms. Puritan churchgoers, passing hours upon hours every week in rapt absorption with the noblest of all
poetry and prose in the pages of their chief book, the Bible, were at least as sensitive to the beauty of words and the sweep of
emotions as our contemporaries upon whose book-shelves Spenser and Milton stand unread.

It is only by entering into the psychology of the period that we can estimate its attitude towards the poetry written by the

pioneers themselves. The Bay Psalm Book (1640), the first book printed in the colonies, is a wretched doggerel arrangement of
the magnificent King James Version of the Psalms, designed to be sung in churches. Few of the New England churches could
sing more than half-a-dozen tunes, and a pitch-pipe was for a long time the only musical instrument allowed. Judged as
hymnology or poetry, the Bay Psalm Book provokes a smile. But the men and women who used it as a handbook of devotion
sang it with their hearts aflame. In judging such a popular seventeenth-century poem as Wigglesworth's Day of Doom one must
strip oneself quite free from the twentieth century, and pretend to be sitting in the chimney-corner of a Puritan kitchen, reading
aloud by that firelight which, as Lowell once humorously suggested, may have added a "livelier relish" to the poet's "premonitions
of eternal combustion." Lowell could afford to laugh about it, having crossed that particular black brook. But for several
generations the boys and girls of New England had read the Day of Doom as if Mr. Wigglesworth, the gentle and somewhat

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sickly minister of Malden, had veritably peeped into Hell. It is the present fashion to underestimate the power of Wigglesworth's
verse. At its best it has a trampling, clattering shock like a charge of cavalry and a sound like clanging steel. Mr. Kipling and
other cunning ballad-makers have imitated the peculiar rhyme structure chosen by the nervous little parson. But no living poet can
move his readers to the fascinated horror once felt by the Puritans as they followed Wigglesworth's relentless gaze into the future
of the soul's destiny.

Historical curiosity may still linger, of course, over other verse-writers of the period. Anne Bradstreet's poems, for instance,

are not without grace and womanly sweetness, in spite of their didactic themes and portentous length. But this lady, born in
England, the daughter of Governor Dudley and later the wife of Governor Bradstreet, chose to imitate the more fantastic of the
moralizing poets of England and France. There is little in her hundreds of pages which seems today the inevitable outcome of her
own experience in the New World. For readers who like roughly mischievous satire, of a type initiated in England by Bishop Hall
and Donne, there is The Simple Cobbler of Agawam written by the roving clergyman Nathaniel Ward. But he lived only a
dozen years in Massachusetts, and his satirical pictures are scarcely more "American" than the satire upon German professors in
Sartor Resartus is "German." Like Charles Dickens's American Notes, Ward's give the reaction of a born Englishman in the
presence of the sights and the talk and the personages of the transatlantic world.

Of all the colonial writings of the seventeenth century, those that have lost least of their interest through the lapse of years are

narratives of struggles with the Indians. The image of the "bloody savage" has always hovered in the background of the American
imagination. Our boys and girls have "played Indian" from the beginning, and the actual Indian is still found, as for three hundred
years past, upon the frontier fringe of our civilization. Novelists like Cooper, historians like Parkman, poets like Longfellow, have
dealt with the rich material offered by the life of the aborigines, but the long series begins with the scribbled story of colonists.
Here are comedy and tragedy, plain narratives of trading and travel, missionary zeal and triumphs; then the inevitable alienation of
the two races and the doom of the native.

The "noble savage" note may be found in John Rolfe, the husband of Pocahontas, with whom, poor fellow, his "best thoughts

are so intangled and enthralled." Other Virginians, like Smith, Strachey, and Percy, show close naturalistic observation, touched
with the abounding Elizabethan zest for novelties. To Alexander Whitaker, however, these "naked slaves of the devil" were "not
so simple as some have supposed." He yearned and labored over their souls, as did John Eliot and Roger Williams and Daniel
Gookin of New England. In the Pequot War of 1637 the grim settlers resolved to be rid of that tribe once for all, and the
narratives of Captain Edward Johnson and Captain John Mason, who led in the storming and slaughter at the Indians' Mystic
Fort, are as piously relentless as anything in the Old Testament. Cromwell at Drogheda, not long after, had soldiers no more
merciless than these exterminating Puritans, who wished to plough their fields henceforth in peace. A generation later the storm
broke again in King Philip's War. Its tales of massacre, captivity, and single-handed fighting linger in the American imagination
still. Typical pamphlets are Mary Rowlandson's thrilling tale of the Lancaster massacre and her subsequent captivity, and the
loud-voiced Captain Church's unvarnished description of King Philip's death. The King, shot down like a wearied bull-moose in
the deep swamp, "fell upon his face in the mud and water, with his gun under him." They "drew him through the mud to the
upland; and a doleful, great, naked dirty beast he looked like." The head brought only thirty shillings at Plymouth: "scanty reward
and poor encouragement," thought Captain Church. William Hubbard, the minister of Ipswich, wrote a comprehensive
Narrative of the Troubles with the Indians in New England, bringing the history down to 1677. Under the better known title
of Indian Wars, this fervid and dramatic tale, penned in a quiet parsonage, has stirred the pulses of every succeeding generation.

The close of King Philip's War, 1676, coinciding as it does with Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, marks an era in the

development of our independent life. The events of that year, in the words of Professor Tyler, "established two very considerable
facts, namely, that English colonists in America could be so provoked as to make physical resistance to the authority of England,
and, second, that English colonists in America could, in the last resort, put down any combination of Indians that might be formed
against them. In other words, it was then made evident that English colonists would certainly be safe in the new world, and also
that they would not always be colonists."

While the end of an historical or literary era cannot always be thus conveniently indicated by a date, there is no doubt that the

final quarter of the seventeenth century witnessed deep changes in the outward life and the inner temper of the colonists. The
"first fine careless rapture" was over. Only a few aged men could recall the memory of the first settlements. Between the founding
of Jamestown and the rebellion under the leadership of Nathaniel Bacon almost seventy years had intervened, an interval
corresponding to that which separates us from the Mexican War. Roger Williams ended his much-enduring and beneficent life in
the flourishing town of Providence in 1684. He had already outlived Cotton and Hooker, Shepard and Winthrop, by more than
thirty years. Inevitably men began, toward the end of the century, to take stock of the great venture of colonization, to scrutinize
their own history and present position, to ask searching questions of themselves. "You have better food and raiment than was in
former times," wrote the aged Roger Clark, in 1676; "but have you better hearts than your forefathers had?" Thomas Walley's
Languishing Commonwealth maintains that "Faith is dead, and Love is cold, and Zeal is gone." Urian Oakes's election sermon
of 1670 in Cambridge is a condemnation of the prevalent worldliness and ostentation. This period of critical in...